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Leakers are going to keep leaking

The case against Reality Leigh Winner isn't so much about her alleged leak of a classified document as it is about deterring future leaks.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly denounced unauthorized disclosures to the media, and now he has his first opportunity to make an example of someone who, according to the Justice Department, admitted to giving a top-secret National Security Agency report to a news organization.

"We're going to find the leakers," Trump said in February. "They're going to pay a big price for leaking."

A reminder that leaking can lead to a criminal charge might make other government workers and contractors think twice, but Winner's case seems unlikely to have the subarctic chilling effect Trump would hope for. Previous cases have not stopped leaks, and the ease with which Winner got caught said more about her own sloppiness than it did about the FBI's sleuthing prowess.

In charging Winner under the Espionage Act, the Justice Department did not specify what or to whom she leaked. But The Washington Post's Devlin Barrett reported that the case centers on an intelligence document that describes a 2016 Russian cyberattack on a company that provides technical support to state voting agencies and a subsequent email hacking scheme aimed at local election officials. The Intercept published a redacted version of the document on Monday.

As Derek Hawkins of the Post explained, Winner, an Air Force veteran working for a defense contractor in Georgia, allegedly made it easy for the FBI to track her down.

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Here's how things appear to have played out, based on court documents and Post reporting: Winner allegedly printed the document at work and delivered it to the Intercept. The NSA figured out that the document had been printed because the Intercept, when seeking comment, showed the agency a scanned image that revealed folds and creases.

How many people had printed the document in question? Only six. That narrowed the field of possible suspects rather quickly. Investigators then discovered that Winner had emailed the Intercept from her work computer.

If you are a prospective leaker, you probably won't conclude from Winner's experience that the FBI will find you, no matter what. You probably will conclude that Winner was just really bad at covering her tracks.

The notion that cracking down on leaks will prevent additional disclosures just isn't borne out by history. On Oct. 28, 2005, special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald announced the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, on five counts related to his leaking the name of a CIA operative to a journalist. The indictment followed a two-year investigation and sent a message that even a top White House official could be held accountable for a leak.

On Nov. 2, 2005 -- just five days later -- The Washington Post used leaked information from unnamed U.S. officials to report that "the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al-Qaida captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe" and that "the secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries." Post reporter Dana Priest won a Pulitzer Prize for the story.

Libby was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison, though he avoided prison time because President George W. Bush commuted his sentence. More recently, Chelsea Manning served seven years in prison for giving a trove of sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks. Edward Snowden, who in 2013 leaked information about surveillance of U.S. citizens, continues to live in exile in Russia.

The possible price of leaking is well known, yet it is consistently true that some government workers and contractors are willing to take risks to publicize information that they believe the public ought to know. The case against Winner isn't likely to change that.

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